On Page SEO is the next step in the SEO process once the keyword research stage has been completed. Once SEO Derby know which keywords you want to rank for, we then need to make changes to your website to tell the search engines that particular pages on your site are relevant for certain key phrases and deserve to be included in the results for people searching for those keywords.There are many changes that need to be made and depending on the complexity and difficulty of the keywords there may be further changes to be made.

There are 3 stages to the on page SEO process. Stages 1 and 2 are absolutely necessary and stage 3 may only be necessary if you are taking on more difficult keywords. We will of course advise you on this when we meet with you.

Stage 1 – Fixing technical Issues on your Website

There are often technical issues with the coding on websites that can cause poor rankings. The website may look fine but if you look at the code there may be big problems. These need fixing before any other work is undertaken. Many website designers know very little about SEO and while they can make perfect looking websites, they often perform badly in search engines due to technical issues. Examples of on page issues needing fixing are:

Non W3C markup valid pages

Multiple homepages due to incorrect redirects (or lack of)

Lack of SEO title and meta tags

Broken links on the website

Template issues with too much code above the content

URL canonicalisation

These and many more issues need to be fixed so that your website has perfect valid coding.

Stage 2- Optimising the code on your website to help rank for your chosen keywords

We need to provide signals to search engines to tell them exactly what your website is about and what keywords individual pages are likely to be relevant for. We can do this on page (coding changes) and off page (building links to your website). On page optimisation provides clear information to search engines that a certain page is relevant to a certain keyword.

We do this by changing the meta tags on your website. These are pieces of code that are not visible to human beings who visit your website but are visible to search engine spiders when they visit and index your website. We will look to change your title tags, H1 tags amongst other things so that they show relevance.

Stage 3 – Content development strategies and siloing

Search engines rank web pages for keywords. The ultimate aim for any SEO is to create authority and relevance for a website. For difficult keywords it is vitally important to develop authority if you want to rank well. Google wants to rank the most relevant websites that are THE authorities in their field. Do you think a 10 page website can easily outrank a 1000 page website? The 10 page website most likely has very little to say about the industry and is likely to not have much relevance and authority.

We’re not saying that you need to build 100’s of low quality pages because relevance and authority are not related to low quality content. You are no doubt an expert in your industry. This knowledge needs to be leveraged to create high quality pages that search engines love to rank.

Obviously it would be foolish to create web pages with thousands of words of content. No human being would be likely to read them! However we can add to the power and authority of pages by creating support pages with more detailed information. We can then add further support pages to these pages and support pages to those pages. With this strategy you can focus all the support pages on the ‘champion’ page which is the one you really want to rank. That page ‘carries’ the power of all of the support pages underneath it. This is a hugely powerful ranking strategy known as ‘siloing’.

So there we are. That’s a good explanation of what we do on page to your website to help it rank. Now you can read about how we do off page optimisation at SEO Derby .